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Reviewed by:
  • Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800
  • Thomas Broman
Bleichmar, Daniela, Paula de Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Notes. Index. 427 pp.

A remarkable thing has happened in the historiography of early modern science in the past twenty years. Whereas it had once focused on the conceptual and institutional issues connected with the so-called Copernican Revolution and its aftermath in subjects such as astronomy and natural philosophy, the story now concentrates far more on natural history, especially botany, and on subjects connected with European exploration and colonial expansion, such as geography and ethnography. More remarkably still, the geographical center of early modern historiography has shifted from France and Great Britain (along with the Netherlands, the Italian states and Central Europe, cast in supporting roles) to, of all places, the Iberian peninsula. Gone are those days when historians could simply assume that nothing worth talking about was taking place anywhere south of the Pyrenees, locked as the region was in superstitious Catholicism and subjected to the implacable rigors of the Inquisition.

The volume under review here bears witness to this transformation. It was stimulated by two nearly simultaneous sessions arranged at meetings of the History of Science Society in 2002 and the Latin American Studies Association in 2003. Given its final total of fifteen research articles and two historiographic essays (more on these below), it is evident that the offerings of the two original panels have been filled out substantially in constructing this volume. Presumably, this expansion of contributions, or perhaps some issues arising from the editorial or production process, helps explains the lengthy delay between the date of these meetings and the current publication. Whatever the reason, the result has been that the volume is not quite as current in its engagement with the relevant secondary literature as a reader might hope from a book published in 2009.

All this is not meant to imply that this book fails as a useful introduction to the research topics and analytical approaches being applied by historians to Ibero-American science, because in fact it is quite good. After an introduction by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, there are two extended historiographic essays, the [End Page 141] first by David Goodman on Spanish science, and the second by Palmira Fontes da Costa and Henrique Leitão on Portuguese science. With a rich historiography to draw on, Goodman's essay provides both a history of how the literature on Spanish science has developed from the 1980s onward, as well as a survey of the topics covered by that literature. It provides an excellent point of entry for anyone wanting to take up this topic for the first time, its value being diminished only somewhat by Goodman's desire to defend the reputations and contributions of older hands against the pretensions of younger, seemingly more modish scholars – including, among others, Cañizares-Esguerra, who wrote the introduction! For their part, da Costa and Leitão had fewer resources to draw upon for a review of the historiography of Portuguese science, so they devoted themselves instead largely to issuing a call for action for more research. There is plenty of justification for doing so, because, as they point out, Portugal's maritime expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was quite extraordinary and established the Portuguese empire along lines that differed significantly from Spain's. Based as it was in a few large colonies and a series of widely dispersed trading outposts, in no way should Portugal's role in the story be subsumed under a broader "Iberian" (read "Spanish") blanket, but instead dealt with separately.

As it would be fruitless to try to discuss the volume's other essays individually for this audience, probably the most useful thing I can do here is to signal some of the more prominent themes in the volume. The first and arguably the best of these is the cluster of writing on geography, cartography and cosmography. The control of space by means of mapping, as articles by María M. Portuondo, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, and Nuria Valverde and Antonio...

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